It's Raining, It's Pouring

I haven't blogged in a while. I've wanted to, and I've sat down to write a post many times in the last two weeks. But every time I've started writing, a virtual diarrhea of negativity and whining keeps coming out. I really hate whining. I hate myself for whining. But I've got to get a post out, so get out your cheese, because I'm serving up the whine.

The end of June is my annual work-my-ass-off time of year. For some reason, this is a time of the year for my clients and prospective clients to make decisions to finally purchase the insurance I've been soliciting for the past 9 months. Ultimately, this is a good thing, because sales=keeping my job. But it always seems to come at once, and it always seems to come at the exact time that I have all sorts of other internal deadlines. Whaaa. Poor me.

But what makes my job so crazy and annoying to the point that all I want to do is cry and whine is that the nature of my position, my occupation, is combative. I work as the intermediary for my clients, representing them to insurance companies. My clients want A, the insurance company wants to offer C, and I have to either fight until we get A, or find an acceptable B. Because of my company's muscle, we usually get A, but it takes a LOT of fight, a lot of politics, and a lot of knowing who to call and feign righteous indignation. It's generally not pretty, and I'm dealing with mega-egos about 99% of the time. But lately, fighting for my clients has taken WAY too much energy, causing me way too much anger and stress. This is the kind of anger and stress that builds up in your tummy until you get stomach cancer or have a heart attack or something. I'm not kidding that I think that my job requires that I have an unnatural amount of bossy, political ire, and I just get tired of it, because I am not a drama queen, I do not enjoy "the fight," like a lot of my colleagues seem to.

I'm just generally in a rut. Work is killing me. Home life is boring. I have no disposable income at the moment. My best friend moved to Canada. George Bush is our president and our culture seems to be degrading into an acceptable brutality and quasi-fascism. It's like reason and beauty have faded into prefab materialism and this strange idolatry where idealism and critical thinking is vilified.

But I think all of this hopelessness and boredom I feel in life right now goes back to my work. It really feels so pointless to care so much about my job, except that I want to do well in everything that I do. But my business helps mostly big companies give more money or benefits to their already too-rich executives. Or help the big companies mitigate risks that will provide them tax free dollars in the event of the loss of a key employee that will cause them a loss of income or a dropping stock price. I understand what they need, but I have some major disdain for the people I call clients a great deal of the time. I want to spend my life working towards helping people who actually need it. I have done that in my current job, like the time I helped the guy with quickly degrading MS keep his life insurance policy so his children could go to college someday. But that was three years ago now. And all I'm doing is helping rich people get richer. That disgusts me.

I just have to turn the negative energy from boredom into restlessness. Restlessness that will make me want to improve things.

Another of my best friends, one who has not moved to Canada, is my inspiration. And my future business partner. She and I have grand plans to work together on an endeavor to provide aid or empowerment to people who today have neither. She works for a non-profit micro-credit institution. They provide small business loans to prospective home-grown business owners in small countries (like Guatemala). Our plan is prepare ourselves, educate ourselves and learn about needs that exist in the world of burgeoning businesses in the underdeveloped and underrepresented world that will allow for self-sufficiency and perhaps an alternative to the globalized, oligarchic world economy that seems inevitable right now. I don't delude myself that this won't take a great deal of work and energy, or that it will be tiring, hard and a major personal economic sacrifice. But perhaps I can feel like what I spend my energy on is part of the solution, and that energy will be spent in much more positive endeavors. Or at least one that won't fill my stomach with cancer causing anger. I hope.